An Apology Six Decades Overdue

To RC who slapped me after recess
in early April of our sixth grade year,
our last of six years in the same classrooms
with the same teachers walking the same blocks:
I am sorry for both my words and thoughts
and how you must have felt when they reached you.

Even now, sixty years down the road, I feel
your fingers blooming red on my shocked cheek,
embarrassment surging into my face,
the unified gasp of all our classmates
sucking the air of apology from me.
I speechless stood in struggle not to cry.

I hear still the gravel crunch of your march,
your two-tone saddle shoes not kicking me
as they usually did in games of chase,
and see yet something I had never seen
in your brown eyes before that day: defeat
and defiance, too, and adult hatred.

MM from down the street had to tell me
what I had done. I really didn’t know.
I have no memory of the words I said,
of the words that sank me in spelling bee,
or the names of those who wondered with me
how we could know for sure if they were real,
but I remember your hand’s stinging rebuke
and how you came back flat the next school day.

I am sorry, and I have been sorry
all these years at the pain we can inflict
without understanding what we have done.

Cecil Morris is a retired high school English teacher. His first collection of poems, At Work in the Garden of Possibilities, came out from Main Street Rag in 2025. He has poems in The 2River View, Common Ground Review, Rust + Moth, The Sugar House Review, and elsewhere.